She read about lovers separated by oceans, a girl's secret pact with the river, a man who built boats but never sailed them.
2025.08.15
珍一直對故事如何能比說故事的人活得更久感到著迷。作為鎮上的非正式「記憶守護者」，她的日子都花在收集他人生活的碎片——信件殘頁、偶然聽見的對話、遺落在二手書裡的舊照片。她將它們像拼布一樣縫合起來，編織出一段不屬於任何人，卻又屬於所有人的過去。
一個雨午後，珍在廢棄的火車站閣樓裡發現了一只箱子。裡面是一本本褪色的日記，每頁的墨跡因歲月而顫抖模糊。字跡從優雅的迴旋變成急促的塗寫，仿佛作者的情感快得讓筆尖追不上。她讀到了被海洋分隔的戀人、一位少女與河流的秘密契約、一個造船卻從未啟航的男人。珍不只是記錄這些故事——她重新想像它們。她會站在市場邊，把片段講給陌生人聽，並根據聽者的心情改變結局。對她來說，真相不如故事留下的情感重要。
她自己的生活在這些故事中幾乎不存在。有人以為這是因為她沒有屬於自己的故事，但珍心知肚明。她的故事是織入百個他人故事的錦布，無形卻牢不可破。
那天夜裡，她闔上最後一本日記，想像著數十年後有人在舊箱子裡發現她的文字，猜想著這位收集他人記憶並將其據為己有的女孩。她微笑著，知道自己也會活在那裡——行間之中，句子的陰影裡。
Jane had always been fascinated by the way stories could outlive the people who told them. As the town’s unofficial “memory keeper,” she spent her days collecting fragments of other lives — scraps of letters, overheard conversations, forgotten photographs left in second-hand books. She would piece them together like a quilt, stitching a past that belonged to no one, yet somehow belonged to everyone.
One rainy afternoon, Jane discovered a box in the attic of the abandoned railway station. Inside were faded journals, each page trembling with ink that had blurred over decades. The handwriting shifted from elegant loops to hurried scrawls, as if the author’s emotions had spilled faster than their pen could keep up. She read about lovers separated by oceans, a girl’s secret pact with the river, a man who built boats but never sailed them.
Jane didn’t just record these stories — she reimagined them. She would stand at the edge of the market, telling fragments to strangers, letting the endings change depending on the listener’s mood. To her, truth was less important than the feeling a story left behind.
Her own life was barely present in these tales. Some thought this was because she had no story of her own, but Jane knew better. Her story was a tapestry woven into hundreds of others, invisible but unbreakable.
That night, as she closed the last journal, she imagined someone, decades from now, finding her own words in an old box, wondering about the girl who collected other people’s memories and made them her own. She smiled, knowing she’d live there too — between the lines, in the shadows of sentences.
